Posts by Pascal Monett 19061 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
It's not because you have no need for some of the functions of a library that nobody else does. The library was not written for you, it was written to answer a specific set of requirements and contains the code necessary to do so.
Asking the compiler to remove functions that are never called is an interesting idea though. I would guess it is technically possible.
If I'm not mistaken, Earth's far distant future is to have its atmosphere stripped away by the Sun in its Red Giant phase, with all the oceans boiled away.
The only question is weather the expansion of our star's diameter will mean that Earth will orbit from farther away or not, which would mean that our charcoaled planet will not be engulfed by our star's outer atmosphere and melt away.
Earth's far distant future is not to become Venus. That may, however, be a rather close future, geologically speaking.
I think you might need to revise your economic cookbook.
The only reason China is on the rise now is because the Communist Party of China has realized that it would do best to let its companies function following the Capitalist regime, with a bit of good ol' Communist control to maintain everything in proper Politburo order.
The Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward in productivity, and it took decades of hardship and starvation for the Glorious Party to realize that and accept it.
The ideal of communism, that everyone has a share of everything and nothing belongs to one man, has been systematically ruined in all so-called communist states by a ruling party that set themselves above all their "comrades" and own expensive datchas, high-powered cars and lots of security personnel, which in turn allows them to dictate absurd and counter-productive orders without fear of reprisal.
Capitalism, for all its faults, is a vastly more egalitarian economic regime.
I'm not by any stretch a physicist, but I've often read that if you think you understand thermodynamics, you're wrong.
Anything that can help those brave firefighters is a good thing in my book. I hope this will pan out and become reliable.
People who put their lives in harm's way to go save other people deserve every bit of help they can get.
So Prosus is active in fostering communities. Great. Never heard of them.
Why does this need to be an acquisition ? Can't they just open a channel and throw So some money for maintenance ?
I get that current SO owners are really happy to become millionnaires (btw, way to go guys to confirm that your selling out is going to make you rich), but I fail to see why Prosus needed to acquire SO in order to "reach 1000s more companies".
No company throws a billion dollars around without a firm grasp of how it wants to monetize that. The penny will drop one day, and we'll all go "so that's why".
Meanwhile, Chandrasekar, go on pretending that SO is going to stay independant. Yeah, sure. If you don't know it yet, you'll find out soon enough that your independence is subject to your new master's will, and he spent big money on you. He'll want something out of it.
There are things we can do right, and the history of the Mars Express is brilliant proof of that. Intelligent minds getting together to solve problems will overcome everything but the heat death of the Universe.
You guys are awesome. Keep up the good work !
I admit to occasionally wonder about how far our radio signals can be determined to be anything other than background noise.
Compared to a star (and lets not start on pulsars), the Earth emits a puny amount of radio waves. I wonder if, should we have an outpost on Ganymede, would it be possible to view a TV broadcast, or even listen to a radio broadcast ?
Then you ask the same question, but one light-year away. I'm absolutely no expert in radio waves, but the strength of our signals when they reach Proxima Centaur must be vanishingly small.
Leave it to The Zuck to find a loophole in a legal employment protection scheme.
That being said, we're talking about a co-founder here. That's not exactly the bottom rung in the employment ladder, if I'm not mistaken.
Where you're at the top, you take your chances and look out for yourself. Running to the employment benefit larder when you feel you didn't get your fair share is rather pathetic.
And that is good news.
Then again, this is the very spirit of the Internet : route around obstruction. The Internet was built on openness and trust, and that is why a moron with money will never be able to nail down any particular part that is not in the IP folders of some company.
IRC is Open Source at its finest. Lee just took over one organization, apparently thinking that he could bend it to his will.
Kudos to all those people who did not accept some petulant man child's idea of management and left him in his playpen to rot.
A smashing article. I enjoyed every line.
Well I think it is safe to assume that, given the amount of junk we are responsible for having put up there, there's a good chance that the impactor was our fault.
Tiny rocks do travel in space, obviously, but they tend to come in swarms and are generally accompanied by bigger rocks that astronomers can find and track.
But, in the absolute, statistically speaking, yes, it could have been a very small meteorite on its way to Earth's atmosphere.
Honestly though, it's a coin toss as to whether you will get roasted or not.
In this case it was about money, so there may well have been someone up the chain blowing his lid and getting all vocal about it. The fact that the hierarchy chose to look at the positive side, aka network performance, is just a stroke of luck.
Terribly sorry, but stringing together the good elements from other games does not always end up in a good game. Just sayin'.
As far as zombie games are concerned, I have to say that 7 Days to Die is my preferred sauce at the moment. They're in Alpha on Steam, but honestly they could go full 1.0 and start talking about patching, because 7DTD is the best Alpha I have ever played on Steam.
"even though she helped other employees pass technical interviews to get onto more senior technical positions, managers told her she 'lacked technical ability' "
Sorry, if you're using someone to review technical interviews, you cannot say that they are lacking in technical ability. That would mean that you are the idiot using people lacking in technical ability to conduct technical interviews.
No. What they are investigating is who the hell thought it was a good idea to post military operational secrets online and why the frak did they not tell Google's robots to not index that.
And that all boils down to : guys, it was last millenium. In this millenium, you still have soldiers who wear their FitBits in combat zones. Nobody understands the security risk of the Internet, but everybody can contribute.
Is this supposed to be a surprise ?
I think it'll take another hundred years before the military nails down the proper procedures.
Either that, or 100,000 losses. It's a toss either way.
"Electricity is one of the few things in Iran that's cheap, thanks to the nation's abundant fossil fuels contribution to the global climate crisis"
TFTFY
Thorium, Iran. Invest in Thorium. You can't make nukes out of it, and you'll have zero emissions, so everybody will stay calm and you'll stop being a major contributor.
Oh really, Mr Cummings ?
And you have no such skeletons in your closet ?
I'm not really up to speed on UK politics, but I do seem to remember that you've done a few things that I thought should have gotten you the same result.
Pot calling kettle black, as usual.
Way to go to boast about how much personal data you obtained without consent in a post-GDPR era.
On top of that, way to go to demonstrate how little you understand of the functioning of Google. Google does not have the image stored in its databases, it has the link to the image, and the metadata surrounding it.
Might not be better, but at least Google cannot show you the image if the host removes it. You can.
The amount of geekery in this thread is impressive.
I would have thought that a 700+ page specification would be a guarantee of thoroughness and reliability - after all, this is not Borkzilla wat wrote it - but apparently there are a number of more intelligent people than me that have a lot to say about it.
El Reg is the best.
We have Internet today, there's no need to lug around a computer to game with friends anymore.
Every Monday and Friday I have a gaming session in the evening with my friends. We play a range of games and we chat via Teamspeak at the same time. Works fine.
Of course, if you want to participate in a LAN competition, we're not talking about the same thing, but even then, I would think there are some who prefer to lug around their tower instead of trusting a laptop.
Indeed. The USA has a strange attraction to the concept of detecting lies, despite the fact that its own Supreme Court has completely thrashed the idea - and that was a process including a trained FBI investigator overseeing the whole thing.
To think that we are capable of writing a program that can allow a computer to detect a lie is just bonkers.
And we don't have AI. We have statistical analysis machines, and we don't know how they work.
It would seem that the results are pretty clear : since Borkzilla borgified GitHub, things have gone worse.
Now the real question is : who is surprised ?
We're not done hearing about how things could have been managed better.
And it's not just the UK. In France I'm hearing a lot about how there are treatments that could facilitate the ordeal of the hospital bed, but apparently doctors are forbidden to mention them.
I have difficulty in believing that, but on the other hand the French government is clearly on a no-holes-barred quest to get everyone vaccinated at any cost, so what am I supposed to think ?
There will be fallout on this, of that I am certain.
Nobody is disputing "Apple’s ironclad control". Apple has every right to police its Store as it sees fit.
The dispute is over money. 30%, to be precise, and I think that that is way too much for a platform that is done and dusted and resells the same bytes over and over again 24/7.
5%.
That's the limit.
Well obviously it couldn't have been a prefectly even disk of dust, else nothing would have had enough gravitational weight to attract anything else.
Besides that, we difinitely need to get away from the idea that the Universe is perfect. It's its imperfections that created it.
The rules that govern its existence, on the other hand, are perfect. We just need to find them out.
That's curious, I thought that Europe wasn't the best place to launch from.
France has its base in Kourou, because colonialism. Russia and the USA are "confined" to their own territory because no colonialism.
China and India use mainland launch because they are already well placed.
I would have thought that the UK would have seeked an agreement with its ex-colonies, some of which could advantageously host a launch platform.
The problem lies right in the title : dragnet.
No fine-tuning, no discrimination, just violate everyone's privacy and hope you find something. After all, you're The Law. The good guy. Except when you abuse your powers to check on your wife, which is sooo easy to do. Just rewatch True Lies.
I would like, nay, I demand, a report on how many times this global violation of privacy has resulted in stopping crime, let alone terrorism.
If you could prove, without doubt, that raping my privacy has stopped significantly more criminals than you could have without it, then I might rethink my attitude on that.
But you won't, because you cannot actually justify any concrete benefit.
Yeah, no worries.
Until The Cloud (TM) disappears for any number of reasons.
And all your work with it.
Look, I know that The Cloud (TM) can very well be a solution, but any company that uses Oracle's products has enough money to manage its own cloud.
And that still looks better to me than subscribing to a ginormous Single Point of Failure that can fall over at any time - mainly when it is least convenient - and for any amount of time, and you have no control over the recovery process.
I just can't fathom why large companies agree to take that kind of risk.
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